Sequester Desperation: The Gold Watch Trick vs. Washington Monument Syndrome vs. Firemen First
There is rumor that a small amount of federal government might get the slightest of trims come March 1. So what are bureaucracies and the politicians that fatten them doing? Reaching for their trusty bag of tricks. Here's the Washington Examiner's Byron York:
There's no doubt President Obama is using the so-called Washington Monument maneuver in the fight with Republicans over sequestration budget cuts. It's a time-honored tactic of bureaucratic warfare: When faced with cuts, pick the best-known and most revered symbol of government and threaten to shut it down. Close the Washington Monument and say, "See? This is what happens when you cut the budget." Meanwhile, all sorts of other eminently cuttable government expenditures go untouched.
So now Obama is warning of drastic cuts in food safety, air traffic control, police and fire protection—in all sorts of services that will allegedly be slashed if the rate of growth of some parts of the federal budget is slowed.
But perhaps the biggest example of the Washington Monument maneuver is coming from the Defense Department, where it goes by another name. Over many decades of defense budget battles, the Pentagon has often used a tactic known as a "gold watch." It means to answer a budget cut proposal by selecting for elimination a program so important and valued—a gold watch—that Pentagon chiefs know political leaders will restore funding rather than go through with the cut.
So now, with sequestration approaching, the Pentagon has announced that the possibility of budget cuts has forced the Navy to delay deployment of the carrier USS Harry S. Truman to the Persian Gulf.
You stay classy, people who spend my money.
Back in 1976, when the opinion-journalism left cared more about non-Defense waste and shameless bureaucratic feather-bedding, Washington Monthly founder Charles Peters coined the "firemen first" principle, whereby
the public will support [the Clever Bureaucrat's] valiant fight against the budget reduction only if essential services are endangered. Thus, C.B. always picks on teachers, policemen, firemen first.
There's a simple way to turn such emotional manipulation around. Which is: You doubled the federal budget in one decade. So what do we have to show for it? It's not enough that the fireman has his job, the Navy carrier is in the Persian Gulf, or that the Washington Monument is open–you don't get to double your budget on maintenance.
